Overcoming Spiritual Myopia: A View Toward Peace Among the Religions

By Margaret Placentra Johnston

MOST OF US HAVE LIMITED SPIRITUAL VISION - and don’t even know it!

• With two trillion galaxies in an expanding universe, how could it be that only the Christians are “saved?”

• Traditional religious symbols are losing power in a changing world (Most people don’t even know they are sup

• Language: English
• Publisher: Margaret Placentra Johnston
• Release date: Nov 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732164819

Book preview

Introduction

Some say we are on the threshold of an overall, society-wide spiritual transformation. Beneath the notice of conventional society, a grass-roots, underground mindset adjustment continues to grow and swell. Conventional news sources will not touch it because it cannot be explained in the short, simplistic news bites to which our society has grown accustomed. It is not sensational, so pithy headlines cannot be written about it. Even to begin to appreciate this transformation requires the kind of sustained attention our conventional media have weaned us away from in recent decades. It requires a more sophisticated form of reasoning, and deeper thought than the dumbed-down, black-and-white (binary) logic in which our news sources—some more egregiously than others—attempt to portray reality.

Also, even those involved seem to lack clarity on what comprises the transformation. Some vaguely drone on and on about spiritual evolution and how this transformation will spawn an idyllic world in which everyone is equal, everyone has what they need, everyone is fulfilled, and everyone is nurtured and happy. Others write complex treatises that are far beyond the comprehension level of the ordinary person. But even the most involved participants, the self-proclaimed ring leaders of this transformation, fail to articulate clearly for the masses exactly what this evolution will consist of and how exactly we are going to get there. The factors leading to and involved in the transformation are not sufficiently explicit; this obliqueness keeps it from being recognized and from spreading as quickly as it might. When someone in the conventional world receives a hint of it, it sounds like nonsense because our airwaves are dominated by the opposite type of message: life is really all about competition, getting ahead of the other guy, convincing people that they are wrong and we are right, and hoarding resources for ourselves, lest we should experience lack of some comfort or security. The conventional world rebels against, refuses to acknowledge, and sees no value in any transformation that could threaten to alter the current order.

I write, not as a leader of this potential transformation, but as someone who sees our society crying out for a major update in our conventional beliefs and a reframing of our mainstream values. This book attempts to cull as simply as possible some of the factors that play into this transformation. It aims to call readers to responsibility in reconsidering some of the outmoded values that certain religious, political, and media leaders continue to inspire. Our insular religions have played an important part in human history. They still serve a vitally important purpose. But so many factors in today’s world render the insular aspects of the traditional religious message untenable that, without an update in focus, peace among the religions remains an increasingly hopeless fantasy.

In my profession as a Doctor of Optometry, I have spent a lifetime correcting physical myopia (shortsightedness or nearsightedness) for my patients. Overcoming Spiritual Myopia uses the term myopia metaphorically to imply that many of our conventional beliefs and values were set down before a number of historical, scientific, sociological, and cosmological discoveries were made. Now that we have access to improved information, we are called to update our understandings accordingly. Failing to do so leaves us mired in an inexcusable myopic blur, while doing it will allow the transformation to move forward.

Ever more information is available now that challenges us to clarify our vision about important concepts. Some new information offers improved spiritual vision, broader understandings, and improved values, resulting in a far more universal and inclusive sense of responsibility toward our fellow human beings and all other elements of the universe. We are confronted with the choice either to allow these new perspectives to inform and improve our understandings or to dig in our heels and reject them without consideration. Human nature is often inclined to choose comfort and ease over an open-minded, dynamic, and energetic engagement with new insights.

One tool we can use to open our hearts and minds to newer understandings is to realize that the historical founders of our religions, the writers of our holy books, and even our current religious leaders have only been able to share wisdom based on the information available to them in their time. The beliefs they have offered have been fine for their period in human knowledge. When limited information about the galaxies was all we had, it was completely acceptable to hold earth-centric religious beliefs that only offered citizens from certain parts of one lonely planet a form of salvation, assuring them a place in the heavens above or eternal punishment in the depths below. Now that more advanced cosmological realities have become known, we must learn to forgive ourselves for believing things that now seem so simplistic.

When some in the conventional world hear of spiritual notions that are not connected to organized religion, they are likely to dismiss them hastily as very superficial and totally invalid. But a new kind of spirituality is arising now that, far from being superficial and invalid, represents instead a necessary result of the various factors discussed in this book. It is not an indication of people trying to escape reality. It is not about people with poor reality testing or over-easy acceptance of woo-woo, wish-fulfilling fantasies. Rather, it consists of those willing to engage with reality more fully, more authentically, and more vigorously than one may do through the avenues typically available in the conventional world. One need only read a few books on the topic (see the bibliography for examples) to recognize that this transformation—this move toward a new spirituality—appeals to those willing to feel both the cold and the warmth of our deepest reality, to embrace the difficult as readily as they bask in comfort, and to live with more vigor. As opposed to the lonely hermit meditating alone all day on a mountaintop, the new spirituality appeals to those ready to focus on this life, doing their utmost to enhance truth and right actions in our current reality, without concern for their own personal salvation in the next life.

Now, anyone turning on any news station at any time or any day will certainly be convinced that the opposite is true. News stations are forced to focus on the negativity because it is only sensational news that sells. Focusing on single, isolated incidents, which are usually negative, also makes news bites easier to understand. As this transformation is a quiet one, a calm one, and a complex one, it is not likely to be reported on. The factors that drive our media are holding it back, and notice of this is being inhibited by the effect that the constant negativity in the news often has on our souls. In addition, I suspect that there are factors motivating some of our political and religious leaders to preserve more conventional understandings and values. Yet in these times a broader understanding is not only possible but also necessary. People with competing insular views cannot live peacefully in an ever more interconnected and globalized society. Unless we want to allow increasing strife, we must seek a bigger story, one that includes and validates wisdom from all religious and spiritual traditions. If we are ever to see the transformation to a new spirituality become manifest as a step toward interreligious peace, we must be willing to correct the spiritual myopia in which conventional understandings and mainstream values seek to keep us mired.

At the time I wrote my first book, Faith Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind, I thought that book’s message was revolutionary. I feared retribution from confirmed literalists who resented my pointing out the value in moving beyond religious literalism. Despite having read hundreds of books on the spiritual path and having run my manuscript by almost as many preliminary readers who would surely have corrected me, I worried that I may have misrepresented the concepts my book contained. Rather, as it turns out, quietly waiting in the wings was an army of people who considered the need to reason oneself beyond religious literalism and insularity to be a matter of course.

While these readers mostly admitted that my presentation told the story in a different way—It has been reheated, and it tastes better than ever! wrote one reviewer—some expressed a mild disappointment that it mainly reiterated things they already knew. These commenters were probably already relatively spiritually aware and were looking to be introduced to new spiritual depths.

I realize now that I should have been more explicit about my mission. My intended audience was not people already on the spiritual path. I had written Faith Beyond Belief in the hope of alerting members of our more conventional society to the very existence of such a path; I wanted to communicate that there is a choice beyond the literal belief level that does not limit a person to stark, literal atheism. My hope was also perhaps to invite conventionally minded readers to dirty their shoes a bit in the mud of the paradoxical, but more comprehensive, world beyond black-and-white spiritual and even cultural reasoning.

In Overcoming Spiritual Myopia, my mission once again is not so much to convey spiritual (or cultural, or scientific, or historical) depth for those already on the path to spiritual mastery. Rather, my purpose is to cull together the many factors that, when taken together, call the average person to consider ways in which an authentic personal spirituality differs from the over-easy wish fulfillment most of our society thinks it is. I also strive to show how, in its most authentic form, a deep spirituality is far more demanding than the Follow the rules and you will be saved! mentality common in conventional religion. Our world is becoming too sophisticated and too complex for conventional thought, and we should welcome an alternative viewpoint.

Personally, I continue to straddle conventional society and what we might call the spiritual community. Willing neither to lose my grip on conventionality (which my profession calls for) nor to abandon my deep interest in full-blown, post-conventional thought, I feel I can be of most service by introducing conventional readers to post-conventional thought and to what is being called the new spirituality—a greatly improved idiom over the old New Age. I aim to describe entry points by which the average person might be introduced to the growing world of spiritual awareness.

John Mabry, in Growing into God, describes for us what Awakening is. He writes in very religious terminology; but my claim is that, as is the case with many who write on such topics, he means it mostly metaphorically. Furthermore, I claim that the same concepts apply to those people who are spiritual but NOT religious. Mabry says, [God] shows us just a little bit, enough to turn us from our intended course, and promises that if we will come with him, he will show us much more. This is the essence of Awakening. It is a minor miracle—sometimes dramatic, sometimes subtle, but usually it is enough to make us go, ‘Whoa! What was that?’ and start us searching in a direction we might not have gone otherwise.¹ Awakening is a brief experience of Union, whereas enlightenment is a permanent state of union.² It is "a conversion—a transformation, if you will—of one’s very perception of Reality. When we are born for the first time, it is into a world that revolves around us. When we have an Awakening experience, we are born again, but this time into a world in which the locus of importance is elsewhere—in fact, everywhere. Awakening is a momentary flash of insight when we are granted a glimpse of the Universe as God sees it."³

How can we translate these insights into terminology the conventional world might recognize? I am trying to bridge the gap between conventional understandings and the unitive view held by mystics—not only within the general spirituality community but also within the growing numbers of the everyday kind who may already be lurking unnoticed in the form of your accountant (yes, really) or your TV repairman, as well as those few, exceptional individuals whose writings have stood the test of time through the centuries. According to spiritual development theorists, the mystical, or unitive, worldview is both more mature than other positions AND very close to what large numbers of ordinary people are approaching in today’s world. It is only by making certain connections that go largely unnoticed in the conventional world that we can recognize how much of our general culture, and most of traditional religion, is designed to lead us away from spiritual maturity—and ever deeper into a seemingly hopeless spiritual myopia.

A few commenters claimed I repeated myself in my first book. In defense of my style, I would like to point out that in treating complex topics it is sometimes necessary to write in a circular fashion, first introducing a concept and then returning to it in more depth after presenting other supporting concepts. If reality occurred in a straight line, I would be able to treat one topic at a time as a separate function. Everything being interconnected as it is, this is not possible.

When my children were young, I once marched into the principal’s office demanding an explanation for why they were taught to tell time, first in kindergarten, then in the first grade, and then again in the second grade. The principal kindly informed me of the concept of a spiraling curriculum, which had not been around in the days when I obtained my master’s degree in education. The idea is to present a subject quickly in the year it is introduced. At that point, it’s not worth spending a lot of time on it, because, while some students will be ready to learn it upon first exposure, many others will not be ready and will not grasp the concepts. The next year, the same subject is presented again, in only slightly more depth. The students who learned it when it was first presented will likely gain new perspective, while those who were not ready the first time may have become ready to pick up the basic lesson. Teaching the subject a third time has the same goal—to pick up the students who were not ready for it the first or second time.

I wrote both Faith Beyond Belief and Overcoming Spiritual Myopia around the idea of a spiraling curriculum, introducing a concept and then moving on to something else before treating the topic in more depth. Because spiritual development is such an emotionally thorny issue, some who see no validity to it on first presentation may gain some appreciation as successive presentations are offered in a different manner.

Spiritual myopia—the central metaphor of this book—calls for some explanation of how I am using the word spiritual. The typical definition limits the spiritual to that which is experienced more individually and the religious to that which is involved with established human institutions. I want to offer a further concept: Spirituality as discussed in this book also refers to that which calls us beyond the limitations of institutional religion, but it means to avoid the cheap emotional appeal of escape from reality, as well. My concept of spirituality offers to help us develop a posture toward reality that is more personally demanding, more creative, and more alive than that which is provided by either institutional religion or the fluffy, escapist, will-o’-the-wisp methods typically connected with what was once called New Age spirituality.

The kind of spiritual vision we discuss here invites a person to involve himself fully in the inevitable mysteries of our existence. It calls a person to go beyond the need to resolve those mysteries into the myopic and misleading certainties offered by most of our religious institutions and to resist the appeal of the over-easy, wish fulfillment tactics offered by the vision of the now outdated New Age.

Chapter 1, The Basics begins—predictably—with a cursory lesson about myopia as the term applies in the eyecare world. This is followed by an explanation of how I am using that concept as a metaphor for a shortsightedness in the way much of society approaches the timeless human need for religious and/or spiritual connection.

Chapter 2, Looking Back through Time, sweeps the reader through a very condensed view of the evolution of religion and the changes that led up to mainstream society’s current religious understandings, especially regarding Christianity.

Chapter 3, Spiritual Development Theory, reintroduces and summarizes the theory that was the core concept of my first book, Faith Beyond Belief. This concept is crucial in understanding the myopia involved in the explicit proclamations of most of our traditional religions.

Chapter 4, Signs and Symptoms of Spiritual Myopia, discusses ways in which some core religious tenets have been distorted into misleading notions that cause shortsighted spiritual vision.

While most readers will be aware of the factors discussed in Chapter 5—New Lenses for Spiritual Clarity—lumping them into a single chapter is meant to focus the readers’ attention on how these influences in today’s society, when taken together, call us beyond traditional limited spiritual understandings.

Chapter 6, The Unitive Level in Spiritual Development Theory, continues the discussion begun in chapter 3. It completes the discussion of spiritual development theory as it applies to the individual, and then it discusses how traits and values typical at the highest spiritual level—when properly understood—promote a healthy society.

Chapter 7, Human Cultural Evolution, discusses how civilizations tend to pass through the same stages in their general evolution as humans do individually. Premodernity, modernity, and postmodernity are compared to the individual development stages described in spiritual development theory. A hopeful view of the human future is presented.

Chapter 8, More Universal Perspectives, furthers the discussion begun in chapter 5, adding factors in our postmodern society that call us to more universal spiritual understandings.

Chapter 9, Overcoming Spiritual Myopia, pulls together how, when viewed as a whole, all the elements of the prior chapters invite us to remove the blinders consciously that provincial religious understandings impose and to overcome our spiritual myopia. Suggestions are offered to prevent spiritual myopia in the upcoming generations.

Chapter 10, Prognosis, offers an optimistic view of what a society cured of its spiritual myopia would look like and discusses how that state of being could contribute to enhanced peace among the religions, an enhanced life experience for all people, and a more responsible posture toward the universe, as well.

Thank you in advance for trusting that Overcoming Spiritual Myopia has something of value to offer you.

1

The Basics: Defining Myopia

What follows is a brief foray into a technical concept that is basic to my optometric profession. I have rendered it in the simplest explanation possible. I want to be sure readers are easily able to make the connection between the very common visual disorder called refractive myopia and the spiritual counterpart I am calling spiritual myopia.

What Is Refractive Myopia?

If you wear glasses to help you see better from a distance, you know what it means to be nearsighted. You can see pretty well up close, but you can’t see too well far away. The medical term for nearsightedness is myopia (my oh’ pee a.) Myopia is a very common visual disorder. A recent study estimates that about 42 percent of the U.S. population is myopic, as is about 30 percent of the world population.¹

In myopia, parallel rays of light entering the eye (such as those that emanate from an object one is trying to view from a distance) come to a point focus in front of the retina, rather than on it, resulting in a blurry image. Glasses or contact lenses that correct myopia cause the parallel rays of light to bend farther out, so that they come to a point focus on the retina, where clear vision results. Glasses and contact-lens prescriptions that eye doctors write to correct myopia extend the person’s vision out into the distance so that they can see the world more clearly.

Figure 1. Sketch of normal eye, myopic eye, and eye with glasses correction

Refractive errors, like myopia, are caused by some combination of genetic and environmental factors. If the eyeball is too long, or the surfaces of the eye are too curved (the refractive elements are too strong,) myopia results from strictly genetic factors. But the incidence of myopia is said to be rising, which is more likely due to environmental factors. A recent study estimated that, by the year 2050, 49.8 percent of the world’s population will suffer from myopia.²

While we have no official explanation, there is a very good chance that myopia is increasing thanks to the ability of the human body to adapt to changing needs. Young people, and even not so young people, now spend much of their day looking at one electronic device or another (or several at once!). Whether it be a computer screen, a phone, or a tablet, these devices are all viewed at arm’s length or closer. When looking at something so close, the eye muscles have to work to create that focus. Only when looking at something twenty feet away or farther are the focusing muscles at rest. If the eye is not given the chance to relax into distance focus, it will adjust its natural, resting point of focus to something closer than twenty feet, causing myopia.

When you look up the word myopia in the dictionary, the first definition describes this refractive error in the eye’s focusing mechanism. However, a second, metaphorical definition is offered: a lack of foresight or discernment: a narrow view of something.³ It is this second